The Wigle Organic Wapsie Valley Pennsylvania Bourbon (Batch 18)

750 ml tannic dervish bottle

Tasting notes:You know, it’s about time they made a bourbon made for WASPs like me!

[Stephen: “Um, John, it says ‘Wapsie’.”]

Ahem. Where was I?

This noses up with an ominous note, as when storm clouds gather on the horizon. Actually, it’s more like when thick bacon strips stay in the pan a little too long and then everything darkens up like shoe leather. When that happens I mutter a little, Barry White-like “oh, yeah.” It’s no different here. I keep coming back to the orotund aspect. It’s St. Louis ribs rather than baby back. Then we get nutmeat: Virginia peanuts, maybe, or macadamia nuts just full of heaviness and fat. Looks like this special Wapsie Valley corn is high in protein. Perhaps that why we get so much robustness and vitality on the nose.

The mouth is spicy like we like it, but not nearly as fatty as the nose. On the contrary, it’s a tannic hedgehog running around, dervish-like, chewing up grassroots. He’s filled with vim, and I’m filled with curiosity. I want to know more about the casks they are pouring this lovely liquid into. The resulting spirit is coating but not cloying, and even chitinous. Yes, there’s soft shell crab carapaces livening things up with a deep minerality.

This is a remarkably long finish that zooms over the sides of the tongue like torches illuminating a long runway on a narrow beachhead. The descent out of the gloaming is tinged with the sorrow of how good things must come to an end. But endings are precisely what are needed to pass over from present experience to cherished memory; only the death of one gives life to other. At this point Bill elbows me and mutters something about my reading too many Russian novels in college. He then talks about how the finish is a continuous extension, and the expression of his face makes it clear that this is a mathematical concept. All of us agree that there is a prolongation of the mouth. Emerging at this point is black tea flecked with gunpowder and gnat bodies. The brooms wielded by Mickey Mouse in Sorcerer’s Apprentice attempt to sweep up the Sootballs in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and we shall just have to call it a stalemate.

Rating:
On the scale of facts about Sootball diets–The Wigle Organic Wapsie Valley Pennsylvania Bourbon (Batch 18) is the fact that they exclusively eat Kompeitō, a Japanese sugar candy–Clearly the special heirloom corn and pastry wheat in this exciting bourbon is, like the candy, responsible for a remarkable transfiguration.